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No one ever mistook former finance minister Jim Flaherty for a Toronto-lover, but he did show up for any number of waterfront press conferences and was occasionally spotted at Evergreen Brick Works.

The closest Flaherty came to expressing his feelings about Toronto was that bizarre day last year when the member’s eyes welled up with tears while he talked about family friend Mayor Rob Ford.

Go figure.

By contrast, Flaherty’s successor in the finance portfolio, Joe Oliver, has no obvious connection with Toronto. He is a strangely generic, almost invisible, personality and, as former minister of natural resources, more associated with Alberta and the tar sands than poor old Hogtown, for which he is now also political minister.

Though Oliver represents the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence and worked for years on Bay Street, he seems to have passed through Toronto without leaving a trace, let alone legacy.

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This doesn’t bode well for the city, which, let’s be honest, needs all the help it can get. Flaherty was enough of an internationalist to grasp that Toronto is a world city, Canada’s global calling card and its most important metropolis. Even if the region didn’t generate nearly 20 percent of Canadian GDP, it would still be the country’s cultural, intellectual and media capital.

Ottawa happens to be where Parliament is located.

But the same qualities that made Oliver ideal to take over finance could make him a dud as minister for Toronto. The city gave Flaherty an opportunity to indulge his secret progressive side, that part of him he generally kept hidden.

There’s no sign Oliver has any similar shadowy characteristics, no indications that he has an interest in cities and urban regeneration. Indeed, he’s best known for being one of a handful of ministers willing to spout the party line without so much as a blink of shame. His pronouncements about environmentalists — “foreign radicals” — and dismissal not just of pipeline opponents but of climate change itself speak of a man out of touch with his times and definitely on the wrong side of history.

No doubt, Toronto’s inherent progressivism has taken a severe beating under Rob Ford; but His Worship never had much downtown appeal to begin with. In post-amalgamation Toronto, that’s no longer a mayoral requirement. Still, the city being what it is, it helps.

Oliver, former investment banker and securities chief, is a money man. That’s what he understands. That’s what enables him to promote the tar sands with a straight face despite the global outrage they have become. As Oliver has made clear, the environment is not too great a price to pay for short-term economic (and political) gain.

Cities, of course, depend on long-term thinking and generational commitment, both anathema to governments. That’s why transit and infrastructure have languished.

Cities are also where most Canadians experience climate change, and where it will have to be fought.

Under Stephen Harper, however, the federal Conservatives have shown little passion for cosmopolitan Canada. It’s no surprise that outside Calgary, the Tories have little city support. They depend on suburbia, but even it grows ever more urban.

As Harper’s main yes-man, Oliver is unlikely to do more than follow orders. As the Tories see Canada, we are our resources. We remain hewers of wood, drawers of water and transporters of tar. Cities need not apply.

Besides, since Flaherty has all but balanced the budget, Joe can dedicate himself to pleasing Bay Street, which is more focused on cheap labour and low taxes than what it can bring to the city. That’s somebody else’s responsibility.

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